Across the world, government agencies have incompletely adapted to the digital age. The online application forms have replaced paper forms. However, the online application forms generally are simply PDF or XML documents and the processing of these forms generally lacks security of personal information and means to guarantee the integrity of the data.
Currently, before building an application, a number of other steps/factors are also involved such as talk, advocate, write papers, do studies, write legislation, pass a law handing instructions to executive branch to implement, and they then try to build an application that captures the spirit of the law, often times by hiring engineers with their own ideas agendas as well.
When government agencies do replace paper applications with secure and effective digital-native applications (for example, for smartphones or computers) in a computer language (such as JavaScript), each new application generally has a unique design specific to a specific agency or a particular service, causing problems for the agency to create the various forms and also for users to understand the various forms. Further, the intent of the elected officials who write the laws may be lost in translation while electronic forms are prepared. Therefore, there is a need for methods and systems to provision electronic forms based on laws of the land in a transparent, efficient and secure fashion.